Genocide Blog 64 -Trump Makes Public that US Actually Owns the Genocide
14.02.2025
US President Donald Trump has just made public exactly how the USA state apparatus sees, and has for decades seen, Israel’s occupation of Palestine. It is as though Trump has ripped a veil of deceit from between all of us and the “reality”, and exposed how it is the USA, itself, runs Israel’s genocide. American leaders have spent decades masking this reality. Trump just rips it off. So, the way LALIT sees the reality of Israel and Palestine becomes plain for everyone to see.
Trump says out aloud that he wants “peace” by means of occupation, expulsion, annexation and, if necessary, annihilation or as he puts it by “letting all hell break loose”. All hell already broke loose under Biden. And, in the bigger picture, all hell already broke loose with the founding of Israel as a Jewish State on the land of the Palestinians who were already living there. Trump has simply torn off the veil of deceit. It is the USA that has, all along, allowed the Israeli state to perpetrate genocide. Trump can insist on a ceasefire, get one, and then announce its imminent cancellation.
The gross enormity of Trump’s proposal for Gaza exposes the gross enormity of the entire colonial project of Israel as a settler state.
Having an unhinged President like Trump in charge, and busy accumulating additional dictatorial powers, is a symptom of the fall of the US empire. Once in power, his actions then accelerate the speed of the fall. Trump’s violent plan exposes the violence that always was: the violence of getting rid of a whole people by slaughter and forced displacement is the epitome of colonialism. Israel is an anachronistic form of colonization carried out in an epoch after the universal repudiation of colonialism and during the era of the opposite of colonization: decolonization.
Yes, Trump has announced, and done so again and again, including when reading from script, that he will “remove”, and he then stresses permanently remove, the entire population of the part of Palestine called Gaza. Just like that. No Mauritian can help but hear the echoes of Diego Garcia and the whole of Chagos, another anachronistic colonial project called BIOT. In his language, Trump dismembers Gaza from the rest of Palestine (again echoing Chagos being dismembered from Mauritius). He then calls it a “piece” of real estate that he will “own”, and he will do as he pleases with it.
The enormity of his declaration is curiously an enormity for two contradictory reasons. It is grotesque, in and of itself, for Trump to propose the forcible removal of 2.3 million people from their own land and then for him to announce he will take it over, and if they resist, he will “let all hell break loose”. But even more grotesque is that what he proposes is a description of what has been going on ever since 1948. Israel and the USA have effectively forcibly removed millions of Palestinians from their own land ever since 1948, and then taking their land over, and if the Palestinians resist, then they “let all hell break loose” against the Palestinians. So, Trump exposes the enormity of Israel’s and the US’s crimes – present and past, not just his future “plans”. So, it is not just a veil ripped from its place where it covered reality, but it is the collapsing and falling of the “parwa”, the partitions, of our lives under capitalism. All the compartments, in geographical space, and even the compartments between past, present and future, collapse.
Trump announces all this dangerous garbage – I say garbage because Trump’s threat is, at this moment in time, a threat made by an empire in free fall. The USA’s bombs and Israel’s military forces made a “demolition site” out of Gaza, murdered 50,000 people, mainly children and other non-combatants, and after 15 months of slaughter and annihilation, Israel and the USA did not succeed, could not succeed, in displacing the Palestinians from Gaza. They did not succeed in defeating Hamas. And they did not succeed, even by this use of such hideous force, in getting back all their captured soldiers.
Instead hundreds of thousands of Palestinians walked the long miles back to Northern Gaza, many camping in make-shift tents.
Instead, Hamas and the other resistance organizations are not only still there, but are still there in numbers as great as before. Biden’s Secretary of State Blinken admitted it in his farewell speech, when he said that, “Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost”. Israel and the USA’s stated war goal was to “finish” Hamas. Well, the Israeli army with all those 2,000-pound American bombs dropped on families from American fighter jets on high, ended up getting defeated by the Palestinian armed resistance groups after 15 months’ of Israeli slaughter of civilians, 15 months of Israeli crimes against humanity, 15 months of Israel committing genocide. The Israeli military and the USA’s iron dome were first defeated on 7 October. The Israeli military bases around Gaza were destroyed. Then, after 15 months’ of crimes against humanity, Israel lost again. All Israel and the USA succeeded in doing was mass slaughter of children and grannies.
Instead, there are still over 70 captives being held in Gaza.
When Trump first made the clear policy statement that America would “own” Gaza, Prime Minister Netanyahu sitting next to him there at the White House nearly fell off his chair to hear that the land they believe “God promised to the Jewish people” was to be “owned” by Trump’s America, instead! So, this was something new. The land being seized would be seized not, as usual, by Israel but this time by the USA itself, the piper who calls the tunes.
All this to say that the veil of deceit that has covered the Israeli and US crimes is now ripped right off. In particular, the USA’s role is clearer now. This means Palestinian freedom is nearer. At least we know with more precision who exactly the enemy is.
All those forces world-wide who have colluded with Israel, and those who have refused to call the genocide a genocide, once the veil has been torn off, begin to stammer and flay their arms around. They look silly. Why were they colluding with such a terrible project? The American Democratic Party, most European leaders of all ilk – British, French, German, Danish – together with their heavily censored press and media lackeys in tow, and the Arab dictatorships and kingdoms – all start very late in the day to recoil. Better late than never. And we hope they keep recoiling, until they retreat, and finally confront the fascist regime in Israel and the fascistic one in the USA.
The colluders begin, for the first time, to act as though they feel uncomfortable with their own collusion with genocide. And so they should.
The time is ripe, once the genocide is exposed, for us socialists and working class forces to mobilize and make our governments act, force our governments to act, so as to free Palestine from this colonial occupation, and let all the refugees go home. Let Palestinians, and Israelis who agree to be there as equals, take decisions together, and prepare for a country where everyone is equal.
The Palestinian people need us. They have lived through the genocide, and they have known all along where the bombs came from, where the vetoes came from, and where the “genocide denial” came from. The genocide deniers, those in power world-wide, are the shocked ones. They cannot easily deny genocide any longer. But they will try.
So, it is the moment for us to win over whole classes of oppressed people to support the Palestinians.
People world-wide who support Palestinians already have our past activism, which has educated us, to plan our actions for the future. Let us list some.
The brave people of Yemen have supported the Palestinians, to the best of their ability, militarily. They are ready to continue.
The Lebanese Hezbollah has, too, at great personal cost in terms of Israeli-American assassinations and terrorist acts like blowing up pagers in their houses, in their pockets, and in their or their children’s hands, stand by the Palestinians. The Hezbollah political party is still there today.
There are brave hands-on actions of workers’ groups world-wide that have broken up Israeli-linked arms factories in Britain and refused to let Israeli goods go through the docks they work at. These actions show that their activism had already educated them as to the role of the accomplices even before Trump came to office. These activists are still there.
Some political parties and even Governments have managed to act all over the world. South Africa put in an ICJ case, and other countries, even Mauritius, at least sent lawyers to support the Palestine Authority case in which the ICJ recently judged Israel’s occupation of Palestine “unlawful”. This is important because it confirms the legality of the armed resistance groups in Palestine. A group of 10 or so countries has set up The Hague Group of countries in order to support the Palestinians in terms of ICJ and ICC judgments and prosecutions.
There were the campus occupations and there are the Palestine support groups all over the world, holding events and organizing boycotts. This educates us all, and we learn about the bizarre colonial project that got under way seriously at the very moment of world-wide de-colonization: the West’s project of setting up Israel on Palestinians’ land in the 1940s, led to the NAKBA or the first genocide against the Palestinians. Yes, how many more people world-wide now know about the Nakba? We have all learnt so much. Those students are all still there, preparing to take up the struggle.
There is the UN Special Rapporteurs’ Ms. Francesca Albanese, who was and is being so honest and brave in her reports, reports that then educate the rest of the world – especially compared, for example, to the Mauritian Pramila Patten’s colluding UN report where, to quote LALIT, her “conclusions and her announcements reproduce the Israeli propaganda”. The brave Rapporteur Albanese is still there, speaking out.
There were brave individual American staff that have resigned from the State Department in protest, meaning they already knew what the USA was up to. They are still contributing to the struggle.
A brave American military serviceman called Aaron Bushnell just one year ago set himself on fire at the gates to the Israeli Embassy in Washington. He wrote it was in protest at “what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers”. He vowed he “will no longer be complicit in genocide”. He is no longer here, but his act will be remembered.
All these forms of resistance against colonization – the armed struggle, protests, actions, court cases and political stands, mean that the veil had already been removed for many, many people, long before Trump’s despicable statement. But, US leaders had kept the genocide normalized. Biden and Obama did. Bush and Clinton before them did. Now Trump says it out aloud. He has a history of this kind of thing. Remember how he announced, in his first mandate, that Israel should just flaunt international law and formally annex the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and move its capital to Jerusalem?
By announcing America’s future “ownership” of Gaza by, if necessary, “letting all hell break loose”, Trump is publicly accepting that the US is complicit in the genocide. By sitting there in the White House alongside Netanyahu and referring to a “demolition site”, he tries to make us somehow forget that the USA and Netanyahu were the very ones that did it, that slaughtered the people living there, destroyed the infrastructure on purpose in an effort to attempt to force Palestinians out of Gaza. Netanyahu, who ought to have been arrested in Washington for crimes against humanity, was instead guest of honour next to Trump.
Soon, we will no doubt hear Trump announcing the annexation of the West Bank.
We must stop Israel. And we must stop the USA. Our responsibility here in Mauritius is to stop the genocide and get the US military base on Diego Garcia closed down before it is used, or re-used, in support of the genocide.
Lindsey Collen, for LALIT
